Gloria Feldt, President and Founder of Take The Lead, Author, Public Speaker, Activist

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Tag: BlogHer

Susan Swartz is a retirement-resistant journalist friend who has written a book and now writes a delightful blog, both called “Juicy Tomatoes.” They extol the virtues and occasionally give a nod to the vices of the second half-century of life.

I ran into Susan at the Blogher conference her in New York earlier this month, when she ran up to me after I appeared on the closing keynote and asked me if I’d ever heard the term “elder blogger.” I had not, though admittedly blogging in general has the air of youth about it.

In this post Susan subsequently wrote, she obviously continued to fret about being so labeled:

Susan, “Elder blogger” makes me laugh. Actually it makes me laugh when I think of Boomers being “elder” because I am too old by four years to be a Boomer and I’ve always thought of you guys as the kids. The description doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the reality.

However, this morning in an e-mail, I did lovingly call 30-year-old author (and my great friend with whom I often do WomenGirlsLadies intergenerational feminist panels) Courtney Martin an “entitled little snot” after she implied in her column that her generation is strategic about picking their political battles. The implication of course is that ours was not. That kind of language bothers me much more than being called an elder anything.

As Susan observed in her post:

In some cultures “elder” is a sign of respect, as it was once in our own and might some day be again. But in our mainstream youth-happy world it creaks.

It does seem that labeling anything older, elder, or “a generational thing” (eye roll) in American culture today is intended to dismiss it as irrelevant.

But to the 20- and 30- somethings who lob aspersions on those of a certain age, we ripe tomatoes can attest that soon enough you’ll either be humbled or emboldened by the growing number of candles on your cake.

I recall being so amused when, during my youthful forties, I found the perfect t-shirt for a friend celebrating his 60th birthday. It read: “Age and treachery overcome youth and skill.”

For me, blogging is a liberating way to be able to speak my piece unfettered by worries or constrictions that I had in the past, whether from the insecurities of youth or the bounds of representing an organizational brand rather than my own.

Let’s hope our less experienced sisters and brothers have a chance to learn as many new technologies as we elders have. It keeps you young.

GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”

At the 2010 Blogher Conference, I was a keynote speaker on closing panel, called “How to Use Your Voice, Your Platform and Your Power.” Need to Know PBS anchor Alison Stewart moderated a powerhouse panel: Marie Wilson, Founder and President of The White House Project (and creator of Take Our Daughters to Work Day), and P. Simran Sethi, Emmy Award-winning journalist, blogger and environmentalist.

Empowerment is a constant theme at and on BlogHer. All signs point to others recognizing our power – as a group and as a demographic. How are we leveraging that power as individuals? How should we be?

Now that we know marketers and advertisers seek the opinions of women (who make over 80% of consumer purchases) and their blogs, how can we control what we are being sold? Now that we know having a unique presence online has turned us into “personal brands,” how can we use it to our best professional advantage? Now that we’re each part of the large BlogHer community and many sub-communities, how can we harness and strategically focus that collective power? How and when and for what can and should we turn on the power spigot?

Here are some clips of me speaking on the panel.

Power unused is power useless.

The internet has changed the shape of what advocacy looks like.

Powerful women used to be reticent to raise their voices. The wonderful thing about the internet is that everyone speaks at the same decibel level.

The future of the feminist movement depends on women and men working together.

Check out this article in Media Post for a summary of the panel as a whole.

GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”

Erin Kotecki Vest, who blogs at BlogHer and Queen of Spain, got on my case with several arguments worthy of response. I have great respect for Erin, and am pleased for this excuse to congratulate her in public on becoming BlogHer’s Producer of Special Projects (high five here!).

However, I learned from hard knocks on the political frontlines that her argument on behalf of Gov. Kaine is self-defeating. Sadly, it also demonstrates how we can make it so incredibly hard to hold politicians’ feet to the fire about reproductive rights, health, and justice, and how women are often entirely too well behaved to make history turn out the way we want it.

True, the issues of birth control, sex education, reproductive rights, and abortion have been so polarized by the media’s false balance (someone else used that phrase on HuffPo last week, but I made it up when I wrote The War on Choice) that both the facts and the framing get skewed in public discourse. That’s frustrating to be sure. But, the deal is, whoever defines the terms of the debate is probably going to win it. And you can’t ever win at all if you don’t stay in the game.

Let’s deal with the realities of this country. The reality of government. The reality of America in 2008.

The abortion issue is never going to be resolved. The abortion issue is never going to go away. The abortion issue is one of the many, many issues that splits this country right down the middle.

I think we can all agree extreme viewpoints in politics, religion, and American life have led to stalemates, ugly campaigning, inaction of government, special interest, and even death, destruction, and wars.

So why is it bad to have a VP who WILL NOT vote to overturn Roe v Wade, yet does express concern with abortion?

That makes him like many of my neighbors. Like many in my family. Like many of my friends and like half of this country. I certainly will not be agreeing with them anytime soon, but I would like Thanksgiving to be more civil.

Senator Obama keeps talking about change. The biggest, single change our country could see is unity. Ending the divisive, nasty way of life we currently lead.

Are you really willing to hear all sides of an argument and bring everyone to the table? Are you really willing to respect all voices in this country? Even the ones you TOTALLY disagree with? Will you at least listen?

Or will you stay set in your extreme ways, and sit and wait for your knight to rescue you?

Bear with me please as I address three points that I believe are most egregiously misguided: 1) The relevance of Roe today, 2) The negotiability of reproductive justice, and 3) The political strategy most likely to succeed.

1. Roe v Wade was an important decision in its time, but it has been chipped away so dramatically by subsequent legislation and court decisions that it is today a fragile shell of what it represented in 1973. Protecting it/not opposing it has become increasingly irrelevant as a consequence. If you haven’t read Jeffrey Toobin’s book about the Supreme Court, The Nine, I commend it to you. I spoke with Toobin; he explained that in 1965 when Griswold v Connecticut gave married couples the right to birth control based on the constitutional “penumbra” (meaning an assumed right not written explicitly in the Constitution) of a right to privacy, there were no gender-based civil rights precedents. Privacy was the best precedent the Court had. And when the question of abortion came before Court, the whole idea of gender equality as women’s civil right was still unformed, so the Court again used the privacy precedent. Asserting privacy rights, however, does not carry the moral or legal heft of acknowledging women’s equality as citizens whose civil rights extend to making their own childbearing decisions.

This might seem like TMI, but it’s necessary in order to understand the insecure backdrop against which the debate about reproductive justice has been carried out, and why today we must proactively create a new legal and ethical basis if we want policies that protect the right to choose about birth control and childbearing–to have or not to have. Merely having a candidate who says he “won’t vote to overturn Roe v Wade but does express concern with abortion” is totally insufficient in 2008.

2. Women’s human and civil right to make their own childbearing decisions is not a negotiable matter, any more than right to attend school without discrimination, or the right to be a Christian to a Jew or a Muslim or no religion at all is negotiable. That doesn’t mean that I or anyone else is unwilling to hear all sides of an argument or that we don’t respect worldviews other than our own. In fact, I’m pretty sure pro-choice folks are a lot more willing, and even interested, to listen to opposing views than those who are anti-choice. It is a fascinating conversation, and we progressives love to play with ideas.

But in the end, just like you can’t be a little bit pregnant; you either have reproductive rights or you don’t. You simply cannot have your right to decide whether and when to be pregnant determined by a shouting match, a committee, or a legislature and still be a full and equal citizen. To live in that kind of environment means your body is metaphorically and sometimes literally being torn apart for the sake of someone else’s ideological comfort.

Erin is 100% right that the debate isn’t going to go way; but that’s all the more reason to create a space for the woman to exercise her personal moral beliefs and the legal right to her own body. If she opposes abortion, she shouldn’t have one. But she has no right to judge her sister is whose shoes she hasn’t walked, or to saddle her with a vice president whose personal beliefs do not respect her moral capacity.

3) Now we come to political strategy. The first principle is never start from a position of compromise. Because in the course of the political process–the art of the possible, as it has been called–there will inevitably be some give and take. And there will be many areas ripe for crafting compromises where eveybody can come away feeling like they have won something. Far from waiting for “your knight to rescue you”, staking out the principled position at the beginning will bring the conversation and the resolution closer to where you want it to be in the end. It’s the position of strength, the position of integrity, and the position of an empowered citizen who actually can make history.

And the time to tell Barack Obama what we want from him is now, before he is nominated and before, goddess willing, he is elected, while he still feels the heat of our passion for reproductive justice on his feet.

GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”